B00AFPTSI0 EBOK (25 page)

A decade ago, Howard Heevner, a dynamic director of a university
call center
, invited me to help him figure out how to maintain the motivation of his callers. The callers were charged with contacting university alumni and asking them to donate money. They were required to ask for donations three times before hanging up, and still faced a rejection rate exceeding 90 percent. Even the most seasoned and successful callers were burning out. As one experienced caller put it: “I found the calls I was making to be extremely difficult. Many of the prospects cut me off in my first couple of sentences and told me they were not interested in giving.”

I assumed that the takers were dropping like flies: they wouldn’t be as committed as the givers. So during training, I measured whether each caller was a giver, matcher, or taker. In their first month on the job, the takers were bringing in an average of more than thirty donations a week. Contrary to my expectation, the givers were much less productive: they were struggling to maintain their motivation, making fewer calls and bringing in under ten donations a week. I was mystified: why were the callers who wanted to make a difference actually making the least difference?

I got my answer one day when I paid a visit to the call center, and noticed a sign one of the callers had posted above his desk:

According to my data, the caller who proudly displayed this sign was a strong giver. Why would a giver feel unappreciated? In reflecting on this sign, I began to think that my initial assumption was correct after all: based on the motivational structure of the job, the givers should be outpacing the takers. The problem was that the givers were being deprived of the rewards they find most energizing.

The takers were motivated by the fact that they were working at the highest-paying job on campus. But the givers lacked the rewards that mattered most to them. Whereas takers tend to care most about benefiting personally from their jobs, givers care deeply about doing jobs that benefit other people. When the callers brought in donations, most of the money went directly to student scholarships, but the callers were left in the dark: they had no idea who was receiving the money, and how it affected their lives.

At the next training session, I invited new callers to read letters from students whose scholarships had been funded by the callers’ work. One scholarship student named Will wrote:

When it came down to making the decision, I discovered that the out-of-state tuition was quite expensive. But this university is in my blood. My grandparents met here. My dad and his four brothers all went here. I even owe my younger brother to this school—he was conceived the night we won the NCAA basketball tournament. All my life I have dreamed of coming here. I was ecstatic to receive the scholarship, and I came to school ready to take full advantage of the opportunities it afforded me. The scholarship has improved my life in many ways . . .

After reading the letters, it took the givers just a week to catch up to the takers. The takers did show some improvement, but the givers responded most powerfully, nearly tripling in weekly calls and donations. Now, they had a stronger emotional grasp of their impact: if they brought in more money, they could help more scholarship students like Will. By spending just five minutes reading about how the job helped other people, the givers were motivated to achieve the same level of productivity as the takers.

But the givers still weren’t seeing the full impact of their jobs. Instead of reading letters, what if they actually met a scholarship recipient face-to-face? When callers interacted with one scholarship recipient in person, they were even more energized. The average caller doubled in calls per hour and minutes on the phone per week. By working harder, the callers reached more alumni, resulting in 144 percent more alumni donating each week. Even more strikingly, revenue quintupled: callers averaged $412 before meeting the scholarship recipient and more than $2,000 afterward. One caller soared from averages of five calls and $100 per shift to nineteen calls and $2,615 per shift. Several control groups of callers, who didn’t meet a scholarship recipient, showed no changes in calls, phone time, donations, or revenue. Overall, just five minutes interacting with one scholarship recipient motivated twenty-three callers to raise an extra $38,451 for the university in a single week.
*
Although the givers, takers, and matchers were all motivated by meeting the scholarship recipient, the gains in effort and revenue were especially pronounced among the givers.

The turnaround highlights a remarkable principle of giver burnout: it has less to do with the amount of giving and more with the amount of feedback about the impact of that giving. Researchers have drawn the same conclusion in health care, where burnout is often described as
compassion fatigue
, “the stress, strain, and weariness of caring for others.” Originally, experts believed that compassion fatigue was caused by expressing too much compassion. But new research has challenged this conclusion. As researchers Olga Klimecki and Tania Singer summarize, “More than all other factors, including . . . the time spent caregiving, it is the perceived suffering that leads to depressive symptoms in the caregiver.” Givers don’t burn out when they devote too much time and energy to giving. They burn out when they’re working with people in need but are unable to help effectively.

Teachers are vulnerable to giver burnout because of the unique temporal experience that defines education. Even though teachers interact with their students on a daily basis, it can take many years for their impact to sink in. By then, students have moved on, and teachers are left wondering: did my work actually matter? With no clear affirmation of the benefits of their giving, the effort becomes more exhausting and harder to sustain. These challenges are pervasive in a setting like Overbrook, where teachers must fight many distractions and disadvantages to stimulate the attention—let alone attendance—of students. When Conrey Callahan was emotionally exhausted, it wasn’t because she was giving too much. It was because she didn’t feel her giving was making a difference. “In teaching, do I have an impact? It’s kind of dicey,” Conrey told me. “I often feel like I’m not doing anything effective, that I’m wasting my time and I’m not making a difference.”

When Conrey launched Minds Matter Philadelphia, she may have been bulking up her schedule, but the net effect was to fill the impact vacuum that she experienced in her teaching job at Overbrook. “With my mentoring program, there’s no doubt; I know that I have a more direct impact,” she says. By mentoring low-income students who were high achievers, she felt able to make more of a difference than in her Overbrook classroom, where each student presented specific challenges. When she mentored high-achieving students, the positive feedback came more rapidly and validated her effort. She watched one mentee, David, blossom from a shy, reserved loner into an outspoken young man with a close group of friends. As with the fund-raising callers meeting a scholarship student who benefited from their work, seeing the impact of her program had an energizing effect.

But that effect wasn’t limited to the mentoring program. Thanks to the energy boost, Conrey developed renewed hope that she could have an impact in her job at Overbrook. Observing the progress of her high-achieving mentees instilled confidence that she could help the students struggling in her own classroom. “I know what I’ve started is really making a difference with these kids. What I’ve seen in three months is a big change for them, and they make me realize how great kids can be.” As she spent more time mentoring students at Minds Matter, she walked into her Overbrook classroom with greater enthusiasm, fueled by a revitalized sense of purpose.

In research with two colleagues, I’ve discovered that the perception of impact serves as a
buffer against stress
, enabling employees to avoid burnout and maintain their motivation and performance. In one study, a student and I found that high school teachers who perceived their jobs as stressful and demanding reported significantly greater burnout. But upon closer inspection, job stress was only linked to higher burnout for teachers who felt they didn’t make a difference. A sense of lasting impact protected against stress, preventing exhaustion.

In the classroom, it sometimes takes years for a teacher’s lesson to hit home with students. By that time, many teachers have lost contact with their students. But at least for a while, teachers have the opportunity to see their short-term impact as they interact face-to-face with their students. Many other jobs provide no contact at all with the people who benefit from our work. In health care, for example, many medical professionals provide critical diagnoses without ever meeting the patients on the other end of their test results. In Israel, a group of
radiologists
evaluated nearly a hundred computed tomography (CT) exams from patients. After three months passed, the radiologists had forgotten the original CT exams, and they evaluated them again. Some of the radiologists got better, showing 53 percent improvement in detecting abnormalities unrelated to the primary reason for the exams. But other radiologists got worse: their accuracy dropped by 28 percent—on the exact same CT exams, in just three months. Why did some radiologists get better while others got worse?

Their patients had been photographed before their exams. Half of the radiologists completed their first CT exams without a patient’s photo. When they did their second CT exams three months later, they saw the photo. These were the radiologists who improved by 53 percent. The other half of the radiologists saw the patient photo in their first CT exams, and then completed their second CT exams three months later with no photo. These were the radiologists who deteriorated by 28 percent.

Attaching a single patient’s photo to a CT exam increased diagnostic accuracy by 46 percent. And roughly 80 percent of the key diagnostic findings came
only when the radiologists saw the patient’s photo
. The radiologists missed
these important findings when the photo was absent—even if they caught them three months earlier. When the radiologists saw the patient’s photo, they felt more empathy. By encouraging empathy, the photos motivated the radiologists to conduct their diagnoses more carefully. Their reports were 29 percent longer when the CT exams included patient photos. When the radiologists saw a photo of a patient, they felt a stronger connection to the human impact of their work. A patient photo “makes each CT scan unique,” said one radiologist.

In a recent study, researcher Nicola Bellé found similar patterns in a study of ninety
Italian nurses
who were invited to assemble surgical kits. After being randomly assigned to meet health-care practitioners who would use the kits, nurses were significantly more productive and more accurate. This effect was particularly pronounced among nurses who had reported strong giver tendencies in a survey. Interestingly, a week after meeting the health-care practitioners who benefited from the surgical kits, all of the nurses actually felt more inclined toward giving. Along with reducing burnout among givers, a firsthand connection to impact can tilt people of all reciprocity styles in the giver direction. When people know how their work makes a difference, they feel energized to contribute more.

Building on this idea that seeing impact can reduce the burnout of givers and motivate others to give, some organizations have designed initiatives to connect employees to the impact of their products and services. At
Wells Fargo
, a vice president named Ben Soccorsy created videos of customers talking about how the company’s low-interest loans helped them reduce and eliminate their unwanted debt. “In many cases, customers felt like they had a massive weight lifted off their shoulders: they now had a plan for paying down their debt,” Soccorsy says. When bankers watched the videos, “it was like a light switch turned on. Bankers realized the impact their work could have—that this loan can really make a difference in customers’ lives. It was a really compelling motivator.” At Medtronic, employees across the company—from engineers to salespeople—pay visits to hospitals to see their medical technologies benefiting patients. “When they’re exhausted,” former Medtronic CEO Bill George told me, “it’s very important that they get out there and see procedures. They can see their impact on patients, which reminds them that they’re here to restore people to full life and health.” Medtronic also holds an annual party for the entire company, more than thirty thousand employees, at which six patients are invited to share their stories about how the company’s products have changed their lives. When they see for the first time how much their work can matter, many employees break down into tears.